Angels and Aliens

This week we are in Los Angeles, and once again I am torn between wondering why we don’t live here and how we would ever survive.

For a weird start to any stay in LA, try walking somewhere. I trekked two miles down Overland looking for coffee and wifi, and didn’t see another human being for almost the entire time. It’s a lonely feeling, being a pedestrian here, like you are the last human alive in a world of four-wheel internal combustion beings. It now makes sense to me that the Terminator is governor.

I did see one person at the intersection of Washington and Overland, a typical collision of 8 lanes of traffic lined by Robek’s, Subway and Starbucks. It was a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. They, too, looked lonely and half-crazy; they must have been if they were walking somewhere in all this concrete.

There was also that earthquake that woke up the westside Monday night (although I was still up at four in the morning, for reasons too stupid to mention). My mother-in-law has earthquake safety handouts from her block committee. The recommendations involve too much setting aside canned food and not enough prayer, frankly: getting under a chair when the entire roof may fall on your head seems about as effectual as assume the crash position when the aluminum tube of jet fuel that you’re flying on is about to speed into the side of a mountain.

But who can complain when it’s 67 degrees and sunny? When there’s Griffith Park and pony rides and a little kiddie train just a short drive from the world’s most awesome French Dip and beer restaurant? Due to the unlikely union that produced my wife, we spend lots of time in two remarkably pure ethnic enclaves: Mexican East LA and Japanese Gardena. I’ve spent long days being the only non-Mexican I’ve seen, where the bussers at King Taco speak Spanish to me because I must just be some kind of albino Michoacano. And for the funeral of my wife’s grandfather years ago, hundreds of Japanese-Americans and seven priests packed the Gardena Buddhist Church; me and half of my wife were the only non-Japanese that I can remember seeing there. These are appropriate ways to do Los Angeles: great food, too much sun, and an uneasy feeling that in a city of angels, you are an alien.